Exploring visual journalism

tulips

Dutch couple Edwin Koeman, and Nitsuje Wolanios planted 250,000 tulips of 183 different varieties in a field outside Milan. The field opened March 28 and will remain open for three or four weeks, depending on the blooming time of the tulips.

The last week in April is typically when the tulip beds at Sherwood Gardens are in full bloom. With heavy rain mid-week, prime viewing may have been made shorter.

The public retreat, a tract once owned by A. S. Abell, founder of The Baltimore Sun, was the creation of John Sherwood in the 1920s.

His work continues through Stratford Green, which plants 80,000 tulip bulbs per year and maintains the six-acre garden. On the morning of May 24, people can participate in the Tulip Dig and purchase this year’s bulbs. The proceeds benefit the historic gardens.

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Sherwood Gardens dates to the mid-1920s, when John W. Sherwood and his wife, Mary Franklin, began planting flower beds with cuttings of boxwoods and other specimens they had collected from the neglected gardens of Colonial estates in Southern Maryland, to fill in bare spots they could see from the house. On a May day in 1930, Sherwood stepped off his back porch and found himself surrounded by hundreds of people. “They were all strangers and they were wandering all over his Guilford estate looking at his flowers,” said a 1957 article in The Sunday Sun Magazine. Since then, blooms at Sherwood Gardens have been a Baltimore tradition.

Today, the Guilford Association, which plants approximately 80,000 bulbs, still maintains Sherwood’s tradition of digging up this season’s bulbs and replacing them. Typically peak bloom occurs the last week of April through the first week in May depending on weather conditions, according the Guilford Association.